Leatherface (2017) Review

Leatherface attempts to give viewers the origin story of Leatherface, the masked chainsaw killer who is horror royalty. Does it succeed in telling his story however?

To start off with the story we follow a group of kids who escaped from a mental institution and are on the run from the cops. This includes a crazy teenage couple and Jed with his friend Bud. Taken as a hostage is the nurse helper Clarice who Jed begins to take a protecting nature to.

With these cast of characters is quickly where the film starts to take the downfall. Our crazy couple don’t fit into the film at all and come off trying to do their best Devils Rejects impression the entire film. Meanwhile Jed just comes across as lifeless with the only character we feel for being Bud.

It doesn’t help that this origin story brings nothing interesting to the table. We get a half decent set up in the mental ward but its the same thing you’ve seen in countless other films. The rest of the film is spent with the kids on the run. That is until the end however, when they throw the side story in about the corrupt cop and his bad past with Jed.

The performances here don’t give much as well. Like I stated before the teenage couple go far above what the film is going as and everyone else just doesn’t do anything to stand out.

As for violence and gore thankfully the film does have some rather good gore with it. Don’t go expected chainsaw kills or a meat hook kill however which brings me to my next point.

I understand that they attempted to give an origin story to Leatherface. What I don’t like though is that we actually don’t see Leatherface until the last minute of the movie or so. They don’t really use any lore from the films in the series either so the explanation they give for why he wares a human mask isn’t really great. They spent so much time involving a story with characters that mean nothing that more often than not I felt Jed took a back seat in what was suppose to be his own film.

Overall Leatherface is a shadow of what it could of been. If it wasn’t for the gore this wouldn’t even be scoring so high. We get a Leatherface origin story that is rushed overall without really focusing much time on how he came to be. In the end what we got instead was a less than mediocre horror film with a bigger named character half halfheartedly attached to it.